Birds of Prey 4K Blu-ray Review & Comments

Simon Crust

Editorial Contributor
Joined
Feb 22, 2005
Messages
4,477
Reaction score
3,013
Points
2,581
Watched this a few days ago and was hoping for better, but I'm not sure why I was hoping for better given previous experience with ensemble DCU films.

I'd agree with 6/10. It's... fine.

The animated series channels the same vibe to a much better effect IMO.
 
I think this line of Simon's review pretty much covers it.
It’s not that it’s a particularly bad film, but it’s not particularly good either; there are good ideas and it looks great, but it is so flimsy and desperately wants to be tough (load it with swearing shall we?) that it simply feels out-dated.

It does have some great ideas and I really did like the intro. But if you are going to have an action comedy then there needs to be some decent action. I know they belatedly brought in Stahelski but it was too little too late. It was nowhere near as bad as its own marketing made it out to be, there was very little actual defeating "the patriarchy" nonsense. But it cost them. Very few men went to see this film but what's hilarious is that even fewer women bothered to turn up.

Poor direction, bad costumes (why is Huntress wearing a black rubbish bag?) and action scenes which did NOT make them look like badasses, just bad. There was a good film in there trying to get out. For anyone who wants to see Harley done properly, watch the DC Universe animation. It's so good that I didn't mind too much the (not so subtle) dig at Fandom Menace.

5.5/10
 
Hmm quite like Marvels universe but have always struggled to find any joy in Dcs, they generally feel empty and humourless ( wonder women was an exception) so will give this a miss.
 
Really disappointed in this one and not because it's bad. No, it's... mediocre. There's flashes of brilliance scattered here and there but it felt like a jarring mess at the end with so much potential left unused. There's a ton of small things but three stuck out:

1) For a movie called "Birds of Prey" there's not much time spent with the Birds! All of that group are interesting characters (Huntress pretty much steals every scene she's in despite the, uh, odd look they went for) and more time on them and less on Harley would have gone a long way to delivering something new.

2) The action. Now to be clear there's some REALLY good stuff here and the Wick influence is clear and often impressive. But for some weird reason they decide to go slow-mo for the show stopping moments which rather defeats the object! The reason that Wick fighting style works is you have the 'wait... did that REALLY just happen' jaw-on-floor moments that make you go buy the UHD and watch it a dozen times over. If we see everything in slow mo it's like showing the audience how the magic trick is done.

3) It's... well, it's set in Gotham. And here we have the problem with a shared universe. This is very clearly Gotham, the Bat exists and this Harley has run into him before. The last third of the movie is a big enough gang war to star in an Arkham game yet there isn't any sighting or even concern from the bad guys that it may attract the Terror that Flaps in the Night! Uh, you may have gathered by the Darkwing reference I don't actually *want* Batman to show up here, way overexposed at this point, but ignoring him completely is a major 'wait...what' moment. Just have a news report about the Justice League being off planet or something, can be a throwaway background moment but cover it off.

While it's not particularly fair it doesn't help that this came out right around the Harley Quinn animated show which has taken many of the same building blocks and created a far more intriguing and interesting offering.
 
Really disappointed in this one and not because it's bad. No, it's... mediocre. There's flashes of brilliance scattered here and there but it felt like a jarring mess at the end with so much potential left unused. There's a ton of small things but three stuck out:

1) For a movie called "Birds of Prey" there's not much time spent with the Birds! All of that group are interesting characters (Huntress pretty much steals every scene she's in despite the, uh, odd look they went for) and more time on them and less on Harley would have gone a long way to delivering something new.

2) The action. Now to be clear there's some REALLY good stuff here and the Wick influence is clear and often impressive. But for some weird reason they decide to go slow-mo for the show stopping moments which rather defeats the object! The reason that Wick fighting style works is you have the 'wait... did that REALLY just happen' jaw-on-floor moments that make you go buy the UHD and watch it a dozen times over. If we see everything in slow mo it's like showing the audience how the magic trick is done.

3) It's... well, it's set in Gotham. And here we have the problem with a shared universe. This is very clearly Gotham, the Bat exists and this Harley has run into him before. The last third of the movie is a big enough gang war to star in an Arkham game yet there isn't any sighting or even concern from the bad guys that it may attract the Terror that Flaps in the Night! Uh, you may have gathered by the Darkwing reference I don't actually *want* Batman to show up here, way overexposed at this point, but ignoring him completely is a major 'wait...what' moment. Just have a news report about the Justice League being off planet or something, can be a throwaway background moment but cover it off.

While it's not particularly fair it doesn't help that this came out right around the Harley Quinn animated show which has taken many of the same building blocks and created a far more intriguing and interesting offering.
I totally disagree about the action but I'm specifically talking about the fight scenes. I've grown up with proper action films and Hong Kong has been doing this for over 30 years. The action in this film reminds me of the Red Room scene from TLJ that a lot of people rave about. I watched that scene and I knew it was awful because of my history but I couldn't articulate it. Then I watched a stunt coordinator break down the scene and I understood that Daisy was off time causing the stunt actors to wait and pretend to be busy doing nothing. A common problem in fight films.

The fight scenes are already stilted and slow, I'm guessing the slow motion is used to make that less obvious.
 
In my opinion 6 is generous.

If you enjoy watching a bunch of girls kicking men in the nuts (both figuratively and literally) for almost two hours, this is the film for you.

I was really disappointed, Harley was the best thing about Suicide Squad.
 
Yep 6 is more than generous. A bit of a turkey
 
Thanks for the Review. Another Movie that is on my Rental List, just to see for myself, as the original Movie Review produced one heck of a lot of Diverse comments. Expecting the same here ;)
 
5/10 for me. The action scenes were poor, with the confetti cannon a notable exception, but the final fight scene when she's tottering about on skates swinging a hammer like an 8 year old at the fair. It just looked.... Vaguely pathetic?
This movie could have been so much better.
 
but the final fight scene when she's tottering about on skates swinging a hammer like an 8 year old at the fair. It just looked.... Vaguely pathetic?

To me it seemed like they had a bunch of ideas they wanted to try out for the scene, and just did a dry run to see how it would work... like, okay we'll do this bit, and now you do that bit, and then onto the next bit.

Except they filmed the dry run and called it a day when they should have done a few more cuts.
I'm sure that's not actually the case and it was all timed and choreographed to the nth degree... just didn't feel it.

Clearly far from the only film to suffer from an inorganic fight scene, but I think the goofy-factor really made it stand out here. You can probably get away with a much weaker scene when it's miscellaneous punching in a dark alley, but when you're knocking out bad guys on a huge turntable in a funhouse with a giant mallet, you have to put in some overtime if you want to really sell it.
 
I think I’m the only one who enjoyed this.
it was a no brainer action film and for once wasn’t just made to build up to something else but an actual stand alone movie.
 
I enjoyed it, for sure. I just wanted it to be better - yet another missed opportunity amongst DC films.

Contrast this with Bloodshot which I watched in close proximity, which was a much lesser film (IMO)

I enjoyed that too, I didn't expect it to be "good" and I knew exactly what I was getting into, the difference was I wasn't disappointed when it was a bit meh.
 
Rather diplomatic review with a pretty transparent subtext. I'm sure you're not going to get pelted with Lil-lets for saying it's crap...
 
EDIT: Nevermind, misread.
 
Last edited:
HQ was one of the better characters in suicide squad but here she had me on the side of the people trying to kill her. Unlike flawed characters and anti hero's she had no redeeming qualities.

She acts like a dick and then breaks the guys legs sitting in the chair who complains. They might have history but not clear at that point in the film.

She then complains that she could do what she wanted when she had the Joker's protection and destroys a factory on a whim.

It's all well and good laying down the badass credentials but they did nothing to balance the scales.

Police station looked good but a building full of armed police and no-one got a shot off.

The god awful fight scene at the end, if it was a fight against the teletubbies at the end, my money is on Tinky Winky.
 
HQ was one of the better characters in suicide squad but here she had me on the side of the people trying to kill her. Unlike flawed characters and anti hero's she had no redeeming qualities.

She acts like a dick and then breaks the guys legs sitting in the chair who complains. They might have history but not clear at that point in the film.

She then complains that she could do what she wanted when she had the Joker's protection and destroys a factory on a whim.

It's all well and good laying down the badass credentials but they did nothing to balance the scales.

Police station looked good but a building full of armed police and no-one got a shot off.

The god awful fight scene at the end, if it was a fight against the teletubbies at the end, my money is on Tinky Winky.
in the DC universe cartoon, she's very 'anti-hero' (to the point of being simply not the worst in a bad bunch lol). But the writing is so good you can still empathise even if you don't quite sympathise with her.
 
I think this line of Simon's review pretty much covers it.
It’s not that it’s a particularly bad film, but it’s not particularly good either; there are good ideas and it looks great, but it is so flimsy and desperately wants to be tough (load it with swearing shall we?) that it simply feels out-dated.

It does have some great ideas and I really did like the intro. But if you are going to have an action comedy then there needs to be some decent action. I know they belatedly brought in Stahelski but it was too little too late. It was nowhere near as bad as its own marketing made it out to be, there was very little actual defeating "the patriarchy" nonsense. But it cost them. Very few men went to see this film but what's hilarious is that even fewer women bothered to turn up.

Poor direction, bad costumes (why is Huntress wearing a black rubbish bag?) and action scenes which did NOT make them look like badasses, just bad. There was a good film in there trying to get out. For anyone who wants to see Harley done properly, watch the DC Universe animation. It's so good that I didn't mind too much the (not so subtle) dig at Fandom Menace.

5.5/10


You could probably copy and paste that onto a review of Suicide Squad as well - although its debatable in that instance whether there really was a good film trying to get out!
 
the animated series is much much better, this was just boring, I fell asleep
 
in the DC universe cartoon, she's very 'anti-hero' (to the point of being simply not the worst in a bad bunch lol). But the writing is so good you can still empathise even if you don't quite sympathise with her.
You hit the nail on the head. DC for some reason seem to keep tripping up on a lot of their films although I enjoyed man of Steel, batman vs superman, wonder woman and aquaman. MCU made design changes to characters such as hawkeye etc to avoid looking like a pantomime convension.

DC have a lot of questionable CGI on their films, take de-aged temura Morrison on in Aquaman vs say Samuel Jackson in captain marvel, or Steppenwolf and let's try and forget moustashgate.
 
You hit the nail on the head. DC for some reason seem to keep tripping up on a lot of their films although I enjoyed man of Steel, batman vs superman, wonder woman and aquaman. MCU made design changes to characters such as hawkeye etc to avoid looking like a pantomime convension.

DC have a lot of questionable CGI on their films, take de-aged temura Morrison on in Aquaman vs say Samuel Jackson in captain marvel, or Steppenwolf and let's try and forget moustashgate.
I lurve Man of Steel (unpopular opinion but I do), Aquaman & Wonder Woman are great, Justice League is no Avengers but I still enjoyed it. I was so pleasantly surprised by Shazam that I didn't sell my disc. If I left any films out, trust me it's better that way lol. I say this just to show that even though I think Marvel is obviously the better product, I'm not a DC hater.

The problem is BoP is that it failed at everything. It mostly failed at being entertaining, interesting and even failed at selling its agenda. Agenda based films can work, but you need talented writers and directors. The current batch of films show what happens when untalented people try to graft a story onto an agenda. The story should come first, always.
 
I think I’m the only one who enjoyed this.
it was a no brainer action film and for once wasn’t just made to build up to something else but an actual stand alone movie.

No, I really enjoyed it too. Would have liked to see where it went in the sequel(s) but it’s unlikely to happen.
 
Seen it in the cinema before the lockdown, okay film with room for improvement. Better than the likes of BVS but not as good as Wonder Woman or Aquaman for that matter. Warner Bros messed up making it R rated in America lost them money.
 
I think I’m the only one who enjoyed this.
it was a no brainer action film and for once wasn’t just made to build up to something else but an actual stand alone movie.
Add me to the I enjoyed it list. It was a fun comic book movie with some genuinely funny moments, the guy with the beard cracked me up.
This definitely had better audio than Bad Boys for Life but gets a 9/10 where BBfL got 10/10.
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom